Few in service requesting ballots

Absentee ballot requests from military members and spouses are alarmingly low this election year, a voter advocacy group contends.

It blames the Department of Defense for foot-dragging on absentee voter reforms that were enacted after the last presidential election.

A four-page report, "Military Voting Update: A Bleak Picture in 2012," builds its worrisome conclusions on what arguably are some thin reeds of data on early ballot requests across nine states, all of which have large military populations and can track voter requests for absentee ballots.

They are Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, Alaska, Colorado, Louisiana and Nevada. Two states with the largest military populations, California and Texas, lack real time data on ballot requests.

Eric Eversole, executive director of the Military Voter Protection Project (MVPP), is comfortable sounding this alarm to urge the military to improve support of absentee voters in these critical weeks before the Nov. 6 election.

Disappointment with military participation in the 2008 election, which totaled 53 percent versus 64 percent for the general electorate, spurred Congress to strengthen military and overseas voting protections in 2009 with passage of the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act.

It requires states to establish more standard procedures to accommodate military and overseas voters. Voter registration requests and absentee ballot applications now can be emailed. States are required to transmit absentee ballots no later than 45 days before an election, which means by Sept. 22 this year.

The law also requires the services to set up voting assistance offices on every military base. These offices, the MVPP explains, are "to provide military voters with an opportunity to register, update their voting address and request an absentee ballot 'as part of the administrative in-processing … upon arrival at a new duty station.'"

That isn't happening, the report says.

As proof it cites performance data filed by voting assistance offices last year and posted on the Federal Voting Assistance Program website.

"In the second quarter of 2011," the report says, "the Air Force reported it provided assistance at only seven of 22 installation voting assistance offices. In its third quarter report, the Air Force indicated only five service members received assistance from these offices."

Asked to comment, the Defense Department's Federal Voting Assistance Program issued a statement that it respects "the perspectives" in the report. It also "is committed to facilitating the absentee registration process" and makes "resources available to the greatest extent possible, communicating the availability of resources via myriad media."

Data on yearly totals on voter assistance by the services, posted on the same FVAP website from which MVPP pulled quirky Air Force data, show that the service helped 104,000 voters last year. Army voter assistance offices said they helped 61,348, Marine Corps offices helped 13,671 and the Navy offices helped fewer than 4,000 voters.

The MVPP projects a "remarkable decline" in military absentee ballots by comparing total ballots requested to date by military voters across the nine states with total absentee ballots requested in 2008. The disparity, which is as wide as 49,000 ballots in Florida, "will be difficult to make up" in what time remains, the report concludes.

Eversole, who authored the report, conceded that he couldn't make an exact comparison of total ballot requests two months before the 2008 election and ballot requests today. But he said he is in close contact with state boards of election and officials share his concern that the size of the surge needed just to match 2008 absentee voting levels "is staggering."

Data from the Virginia Board of Elections shows that in 2008 more than 36,000 military voters requested absentee ballots. So far this year fewer than 2,000 have.

Don Palmer, secretary of the Virginia board, said he doesn't challenge critics who say the Department of Defense and the services have "work to do" to implement reforms mandated by the MOVE Act.

"I am a reservist in the Navy. I've been doing it for 22 years. And obviously [voter support] isn't their first priority," Palmer said. "We struggle sometimes to have DoD show the same urgency because they have other missions. I understand that."

Terry Wagoner, absentee voter coordinator for Virginia's board of elections, said it is "still very early" to try to assess the level of military participation. The number of ballot requests will surge, she said.

"Where I would start to become very concerned would be at that 45-day mark," she said.